The Week in Review: March 16th, 2014

Smooth, right? If it looks anything like a Patrick Nagel piece, I love it. The weather has been turning towards spring here in Denver, and I feel like I’ve gotten back on top of my reading. Whew! I’m not sure what I’ll be doing for St. Patrick’s Day, beyond going to go see Frozen at the mall, but I imagine Lucky Charms will be involved somehow.

Links

Daylight Savings Time is so weird. This YouTube video explains why.

Corpus Libris is a tumblr devoted to images of people holding books over their bodies. Charming!

BBC America is producing The Real History of Science Fiction, a four-part miniseries about major themes in science fiction featuring everyone you have ever loved and also Steven Moffat. (Both Uhuras! Anthony Daniels! Christopher Lloyd!) It’ll air on April 19th, which I will assume means BBC America is giving me a belated birthday present. Thanks!

ladybusiness’ newest project: The Friendship Zone, a tumblr devoted to women being friends with women. It’s so awesome!

RuPaul’s Drag Race is back! While pursuing the AV Club comments on last week’s episode, conversation inevitably turned to who is going to play who on Snatch Game. Someone proposed that Bianca Del Rio should do Nancy Reagan, which left me in hysterics, but another commentator mentioned that John Hodgeman should judge in character as Ayn Rand. I went to investigate and discovered the greatest Ayn Rand impression ever.

XKCD creator Randall Munroe also does What If?, a column where he answers absurd columns with science. And it’s going to become a book! Huzzah! We must buy it in droves, because Munroe is an awesome human being.

Beyond Clueless is a documentary about teen films that premiered at SXSW this year. Given that I just saw Clueless for the first time, I’m interested to see adolescence perpetuated on screen en masse.

Rumors have been circulating that Hillary Clinton might be considering a presidential run in 2016. That makes this 1992 Vanity Fair article, “What Hillary Wants,” very fascinating. It looks at Clinton’s role in her husband’s political career, her own accomplishments and ambitions, and the Clintons’ marriage. I learned a lot about both Clintons and the early nineties reading it.

Back to the Future is going to be this summer’s fashion template. I’m more of a Ducky myself, but nonetheless, my time has come.

Karen Gillan’s new ABC sitcom Selfie is a modern update of My Fair Lady, featuring a woman whose horrible break-up becomes a viral video and decides to undergo image training by her own Professor Higgins. Said Professor Higgins will be played by John Cho. I am usually never okay with Higgins and Eliza getting together, but I want it and the show hasn’t even started. (As long as he can still guest on Sleepy Hollow as Andy.)

Female Armor Bingo has been making the rounds lately, but I find Female Armor Rhetoric Bingo much more intriguing, because it breaks down all the nonreasons for illogical female armor to exist. (The whole blog, Bikini Armor Battle Damage, is genius and well worth an archive binge.)

In the same vein, tumblr user thetrekkiehasthephonebox explains exactly why the female uniforms in the Star Trek reboots are kind of useless, since they don’t show rank.

Reddit AMAs are great, but they’re not exactly the neatest format to read. Interviewly takes those interviews and puts them into a much more readable format, saving you from digging through unanswered questions to get all the meat off the bone.

Keeley Hawes will be joining Doctor Who as a villainous banker named Ms. Delphox. She’s also a redhead with eye wear, which makes me suspect Moffat has a pattern going. Did I say pattern? I meant type.

Lupita Nyong’o has met with J. J. Abrams about a role in Star Wars VII. I pounded the alarm so hard it broke for eighties X-Men, but this is just as exciting. Plus, she might be playing a descendant of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s. (Obi-Wan had a brother named Owen in the Extended Universe, so I’m assuming it’s that. Well, it’s either that or let my dormant Obi-Wan/Padme feels rise to the surface.

The first kiss on film is between two ladies—for Victorian reasons, but still. Cute!

At GQ, Michael Paterniti writes about the burrneshas of Albania. The pronoun work is a little scattershot (one burrnesha uses female and male pronouns, which Paterniti compresses into “he-she” instead of reaching for “they” or any other gender neutral pronoun), but it raises a lot of interesting questions about third genders in otherwise rigid gender binaries and how the oath of the burrnesha is about agency, not gender, which says a lot about culture.

Okay, this is an IKEA ad from Singapore, but it’s also a great mix of a pretty friendly and dedicated cosplayer and organization porn. DELIGHTFUL.

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8 thoughts on “The Week in Review: March 16th, 2014”

I adore Lestat too – the books and the movie were such a huge formative influence on me. But I hated the last Vampire Chronicles book, Blood Canticle, with a fierce passion, and I don’t think I can work up the courage to pick up this one after that. Maybe I’ll wait and see what trusted friends say?

I dropped my face into my hands at this news about Tiger Lily. Why are people like this. Also, Peter Pan is racist to begin with and maybe we shouldn’t make a bunch more adaptations of it because it is, yeah, pretty racist.

I think there’s space to adapt racist texts—if you’re making them not racist. Peter Pan has been played with fast and loose for decades; it’s time for someone to have the wild idea that Tiger Lily can be transformed into an awesome character. Barf barf barf.

It’s interesting that in Pygmalion (the original version of My Fair Lady), there’s no real suggestion that Eliza ends up with Higgins. He mocks her stated intention of marrying Freddy Eynsford-Hill, but she doesn’t agree with his suggestion that she just carry on living in his house (not getting married, mind you) along with Colonel Pickering. Pygmalion is actually a lot more feminist than My Fair Lady is, IMO.

Thanks for all those other links – I like the post about rank for female officers in the new reboot of Star Trek – that is shocking.